Lee Martin's Blog, page 69

Writing About Times Gone By

I can’t claim to be an expert when it comes to writing about bygone eras, but I’ve set a novel (Quakertown) in 1920s Texas, and one (The Bright Forever) in 1972 southern Indiana. I’m guessing 1972, forty years in the rear view now, makes that novel an example of historical fiction. One difference, of course, in my writing of the two books is the fact that I was sixteen years old in 1972, and, therefore, able to rely on memory for my primary research, supplementing it with the reading of old newspapers, high school yearbooks, court reports, etc.. I also visited various web sites to find out when certain songs that I recalled from those teenage years were being played on the radio. I looked at maps of cities. I interviewed anyone who had a connection, no matter how slight, with the true story upon which I based the novel.

When it came to 1920s Texas, though, I obviously had no memory to rely upon. I only had the tools of research. Again, I fell in love with reading old newspapers form the time and place, not only to get the facts of the true story I was following, but also to immerse myself in the culture of the time period. I loved gathering the names of the movies playing at the local theaters, cataloging the men’s and women’s fashions as advertised, keeping track of the society news and the comings and goings of the citizens. I came to realize that the research wasn’t just about getting the details right. It was also a way of transporting myself, best I could, to the place and the time I meant to reconstruct. By that, I mean it was a means to make myself feel like I was living in a long-lost world. It was my way of making the past present.

All of this holds true for nonfiction as well. Even if I’m writing memoir, a genre of memory, I’m still reaching out for the artifacts of my own past: letters, photographs, school awards, newspaper clippings, weather reports, you name it.

It looks as if I’m about to be seduced again. There’s a story from 1844-1845 near where I grew up in Lawrence County, Illinois, that’s calling me. I know a little bit about that time period, but I can tell you that nothing teaches you what you don’t know more quickly than trying to craft a narrative set during years long before you were alive. Quickly, you’re up against questions of details, culture, history, and language. For instance, I set a young girl running along a hog path through the woods in southeastern Illinois on an August day. What would she see, smell, hear? It’s easy enough to call from my own experience the smell of wood smoke, the calling of crows, the whippet branches of saplings, the snarl of blackberry thickets. But what details make this moment belong to 1844? Perhaps someone is still clearing land . Perhaps there’s the thunks of axe blades finding heartwood, the crash of trees to the ground, the burning of brush. And what might that young girl be carrying with her from the larger world? Maybe she’s a Millerite, the religious sect that believed on October 22, 1844, Christ would come, and the saintly would ascend into Heaven. What would that make her feel about her life and how would it dictate the actions she’d take?

Let’s say that girl runs into an apothecary shop to fetch the druggist because someone is ill. Jeez, what’s in that shop? What sorts of clothes is the druggist wearing? What sorts of medicines does he have at his disposal? I went in search of the answer to those questions, and soon I knew that at that time most of the medicines would have been herbal in nature, that the bottles holding the tinctures of opium and cannabis would have been hand-blown and had squared corners and caps made from fruitwood. All of those details mattered to me, not only because of authenticity but also because I know my characters in part from the objects they hold and the things around them.

I know them, as well, through their language. Not just the words that they speak, but the language of the narrative voice as well.  I have to know when certain words and figures of speech came into the common usage. I don’t want the language to caricature the time period, but I want it to have a flavor that isn’t completely of our present day. I wrote an opening passage:

The Mister took sick on a Monday morning in August when the corn was firing for want of rain and the locusts were chirring in the woods. Not a breath of air in the cabin and horseflies all about and making a nuisance. Not a day anyone would want to feel puny.

Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this opening will be a keeper, but something about the sound of it seems right to me, right and necessary to my first step into 1844.

I guess I’m saying I have to hear the time period and the place through the language first. Then I have to know the larger world of that time. Finally, I have to create a texture of details that brings that world to life for me to the point that I’m no longer feeling my way; instead, I’m participating. I’m living the story, the way I would have had I been my characters, if my life had been theirs.

From the Heat-Land

This is the land of my blood, this prairie land, this farm land, this land now scorched with heat, this land thirsty for rain.

I’m talking about Lawrence County, Illinois, particularly Lukin Township, but I could just as easily be talking about so much of the Midwest this summer, a summer of sizzling temperatures and dry conditions. I’m talking about the land where the corn crop is in danger; already some farmers have cut fields prematurely, opting to salvage the fired and stunted plants for silage.

I’m talking about the land of my family, so often a land of loss. My father lost his hands in a corn picker in early November, 1956. After that, my mother lost what was left of her youth. She lost it by crawling under combines to grease fittings, by driving grain trucks to the elevator on sweltering days, by milking cows in freezing weather, by helping my father herd hogs and cattle into pens, by working the substantial vegetable garden all summer long, by putting up quart after quart of tomato juice, green beans, pickles, corn. My mother lost her youth by being who she was, a farm wife who so often had to be the hands her husband lacked. I never heard her utter a single word of complaint. There were many lessons my parents tried to teach me that wouldn’t set root until I was older, but the one thing I always knew from them was this: when your life is hard and when it doesn’t seem that you can get through it, all you can do is put your head down and push. All you can do is keep going.

It’s been years since I’ve lived on the eighty acres my father owned in Lukin Township, but my muscle memory still retains the strain of working that land: the weight of hay bales, brought to the knee and bucked up to stack on the wagon or in the mow; the heat of the tractor exhaust blowing into my face as I made pass after pass, plowing or disking a field; the blisters on my palms from walking the beans and swinging a hoe to cut down jimpson weed and pokeberry; the stumble of my steps over the hard clay clods.  I remember afternoons when clouds gathered over the fields and the air smelled like rain, and my father finally said, “C’mon.” He drove the tractor into the machine shed. I parked the truck in the farmyard and made sure the windows were up. We met on the front porch of the house, and my father told me to fetch us Pepsi-Colas. We sat in folding lawn chairs and drank, watching the rain come across the fields, moving up our lane, until finally it was upon us  and we had to scoot our chairs a little farther back on the porch. I remember how the rain dripped from the leaves of the giant oak in our front yard. The wind came up and the air cooled, and we had nothing to do but to sit and watch as the rain kept falling. I remember the ecstasy of it. I remember the release from labor. I remember my father saying, “Just look at it come down.” And that’s what we did; we sat there and watched it rain.

May it come soon now for the sake of all those farmers in the Midwest. May it come soon for all our sakes, those of us dependent on those farmers and the vagaries of weather for much of our food and the ethanol in the gasoline we buy. When the crops fail, the prices we pay in the grocery and at the pump go up. It’s as simple as that, but so many people don’t stop to think about how their lives are connected to what’s going on in the land of my family, the land where my father worked until his heart gave out, the land where so many others to this day keep pushing their bodies against the odds. There’s a lesson here for those who write, and the lesson is this: you’ve failed before you ever put pen to paper or keystroke to computer if you think there are people in this world whose lives don’t matter. Look at this picture of one of the doors on my father’s old pickup truck left behind for over sixty years on the eighty acres that another man now owns:

Notice my father’s name painted on the door along with Sumner, ILL.  Apparently he bought the truck after it had been used at the ice house in Lawrenceville because you can see those words as well. I like the way the years of exposure in a wooded area on what was once our farm have eroded the paint until that double ownership shows the ancestry of labor this pickup performed. I like to see my father’s name, the rust beginning to cover it as if it’s trying to rise from blood.

Look at this other picture of the truck and see whether it touches anything inside you. See if these two photographs, no matter how distant from your own experience, hook in somehow with your own life. Think about everything we leave behind, everything we strive to achieve, every disappointment we suffer, every dry season that leaves us wanting for rain.

When we write, we practice the art of empathy. We try to imagine what it is to be the people we put on the page. No matter how unlike ourselves, we find something to bind us together, something human to remind us we’re all connected. This summer’s heat and drought connect us in ways we might not fully appreciate, but the scorched land belongs to all of us. A pickup truck gone to ruin sits among trees and vines on an eighty-acre parcel of land in southeastern Illinois. You’d never even know it was there. A pickup truck that still bears my father’s name.

I remember how sometimes in the field, he’d lift his head and look off toward the horizon. “Hear them?” he’d say, and I’d listen to the mournful call of yellow-billed cuckoos. “Rain crows,” he’d say and then he’d be still and in his silence, I’d feel his hope, his longing. They’d become mine as well.

Maybe, if I tell this story well enough, I can make them yours, too. Maybe you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, when I say we all matter to one another. Surely you know, as my father did, as I do, what it is to want.

“Just listen to them calling for rain,” he’d say in a whisper. “Mercy, just listen.”

 

Summer Writers’ Conferences

I hope everyone’s summer is going along nicely. Sure has been hot and dry here in Ohio. I’ve been on the road a bit since the school year ended, teaching first at The Sun writing retreat in the deep woods of northwest Massachusetts and then at the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference in Lincoln, NE, a city that’s dear to my heart, having spent five wonderful years there doing my doctorate and writing the stories that would make up my dissertation, which would become my first book, the story collection, The Least You Need to Know, from which this blog takes its name.

I had a wonderful and nostalgic week in Lincoln. I visited some old haunts, saw some old friends, made some new ones, and had a fantastic bunch of writers in my fiction workshop.

We had a few laughs (yes, the jokes were flying), we read some excellent stories and excerpts from novels, we talked about all things important to literary fiction: characterization, structure, detail, point of view, and language. It’s always a privilege for me to be invited to teach at these conferences, where I become, in whatever small or large way, a part of the participants’ passion for writing. When I was a young writer, post MFA, I started attending writers’ conferences, and each one of them taught me something I didn’t yet know and also allowed me to start friendships, many of which continue to this day, and to establish professional connections that have sometimes helped ease my way along my writers’ journey. I’m always glad to give back by teaching workshops at these summer conferences, sharing what I’ve come to know more deeply in this lifelong apprenticeship to what my former colleague Lee K. Abbott, now enjoying the vistas of New Mexico in retirement, always called “the life lived between margins.”

If you’re looking for collegiality, professional networking, and a time when other writers pay very close attention to your work, I encourage you to consider attending a conference. There are so many good ones out there. Here’s a link to a valuable resource for all matters writers’ conferences and colonies: http://www.writersconf.org/

The next conference where I’ll be teaching will be the Midwest Writers’ Workshop in Muncie, Indiana, in late July: http://www.midwestwriters.org/

I’ll be presenting two sessions, each dealing with flash fiction and what it can teach us not only about its own form but about longer forms as well.

I hope we get some rain soon, and I hope all our summer writing plans go. . .well. . .just as planned.

 

 

 

 

Thickly Settled:Some Thoughts on MFA Programs

Now that the school year is done at Ohio State, I’ve hit the road to teach at some writing conferences. A week ago, I was in Rowe, MA, teaching at a retreat sponsored by The Sun Magazine. If you don’t know this amazing magazine, I hope you’ll check it out:

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/

Personal, Political, Provocative. . .and, ad-free.

The route from the Hartford, CT, airport to Rowe included the Mohawk Trail in northwest Massachusetts, a scenic 63-mile east-west highway, that runs from the NY/MA line to Millers Falls on the Connecticut River. I arrived late in the evening and caught a ride from the airport with Krista Bremer and Molly Herboth from The Sun. Krista was also teaching at the weekend retreat, and Molly’s job, as far as I could tell, was to keep everyone delighted with laughter, in addition to taking T-shirt orders and making sure everyone had what they needed. They were excellent company.

So we’re in the rental car on the Mohawk Trail near midnight, and we’re looking for a blue sign on the right, two miles past downtown Charlemont. We’ve passed the first sign that says, “Welcome to Charlemont,” and we’ve gone by a motel with a teepee outside and a few other businesses. Hmm, we wonder. Downtown? We start counting miles, quickly coming to the conclusion that we’ve missed our blue sign signaling the turn toward Rowe.

We retrace our route. Still no blue sign. Krista suggests that we didn’t go far enough to find the downtown area on our first trip. So we turn around again. We drive on, farther than we have previously, and sure enough, we come to a downtown area of a few cafes, stores, a church, etc. There’s a sign that says, “Thickly Settled,” and I find the message both cryptic and charming. The next day at lunch, I ask the waitress what the sign means. She says, “It means you’re in downtown Charlemont, and the speed limit is 30 mph.” So, “thickly settled,” as in “heavily populated.” Wow, I think, that’s a powerful sign. Two words to not only indicate a more densely populated downtown area, but also to imply the speed limit. The sign says all of that, but only to the locals, the ones in the know.

It seems to me that a good MFA program should be thickly settled. That is to say, thick with community and vibrant with the energy that comes from each member doing his or her best to contribute to the common good. I tell students that they’ll never have as close attention paid to their work as they will during the time they’re in their MFA programs. Take advantage of every opportunity. Give as much as you want to get.

What does that mean? Here are a few scenarios:

1.     A visiting writer is on campus to give a reading and perhaps to do an informal question and answer with students. Be there. When I was in my own MFA program, I was afraid that if I missed a reading, even those outside my primary genre, I might miss hearing the exact thing I needed to make me a better writer.

2.     You’d love to get advice from one of your professors, or even ask him or her to read a piece of yours and offer some suggestions, but you’re afraid to bother said professor because of course we’re all insanely busy, so your inclination is not to ask for what you want. Don’t hesitate. Of course, we’re insanely busy, as are you, and we’re all a part of this community and we want you to succeed just as much as you do. So send us emails, or knock on our office doors. Hey, we get paid for this sort of thing. Abuse us at will

3.     You’re in a workshop, and each week you have to mark manuscripts and prepare critique letters for you peers, and man-oh-man, that gets to be a lot of work, and if you slack off just a tad, maybe even “forget” to write a letter or two, what does it matter? Give yourself a talking-to. Remind yourself why you’re in the program. Because you want to be a writer the rest of your life. Maybe you even want to have a teaching career. When you don’t write the letter, you don’t think deeply about the craft of a particular piece, not to mention the possibilities contained within that draft if the writer would only do this or that. You give up a chance to deepen your knowledge of the craft. You fail to internalize something you’ll need to know somewhere down the road. The workshop itself should be particularly thickly settled. Everyone should be contributing to everyone’s successes. When you do that, you increase the chances for your your own success.

4.     One of your peers has a piece accepted at a really good journal, and as much as you’re happy for that person, perhaps you’re sad for yourself because you’d really like to have one of your pieces accepted at a really good journal, and when-oh-when is that ever going to happen? It’s easy to give into despair in this game. Don’t. I know this is a tough one, but believe me all the energy spent on resentment, envy, etc. is energy not spent on the next great thing you’re going to write if you can only find a way to keep your focus on your own journey and not someone else’s. The success of one is a representative of the success of the entire community, and sooner or later, it’s going to be your turn. Celebrate the good news and keep writing.

In an MFA program, if you give unselfishly by participating in the literary life that it’s your good fortune to enjoy, you’ll make your journey a little easier and much, much richer. Thickly settled. All of us taking one another further down the road.

Which is where I’ll be come Sunday. On the way to Lincoln, NE, to teach in the Nebraska Summer Writer’s Conference. Countless people who aren’t in an MFA program are hungry for that kind of community, if only for a week here and there, or at a retreat as was the case in Rowe, MA. It’s always a privilege for me to be part of their journeys.

 

 

 

From the Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Week 10

Folks, we’ve reached the end of my ten-week MFA workshop in Creative Nonfiction, so this will be the last post from the trenches.What a glorious group of writers I had the privilege of sharing the table with on Tuesday afternoons. A big shout-out to each of them for the talents they brought to our workshop room, plus the thoughtfulness and tact they displayed. They were truly a community of writers genuinely interested in helping one another more fully realize their essays. Thanks, too, to everyone who has taken the time to read these posts and to make a comment. It’s been a pleasure to have you on board.

Yesterday, we had two essays up for discussion, both of them trying something a little different (at least for these two writers) with form. We talked about a braided essay and made suggestions for how the three strands could better be in conversation with one another. My point here was that it’s not enough to just weave three strands together; they have to actually talk to one another, and they have to invite the reader into the conversation. This particular essay was trying to weave together the writer’s response to aging, her feelings of losing her son as he grew older, and the diagnosis of a friend’s illness. It was that last strand that seemed to not quite be talking to the other two strands. Everything seemed to be revolving around issues of loss, but when I asked the writer to talk about what she was going for in the last move of the essay (sometimes I find it helpful in a nonfiction workshop to invite the writer to speak, and I was just about to issue the invitation when one of the students said she thought it might be helpful in this case; great minds thinking alike!), the one that tries to contain all three strands and make them resonate with meaning, she talked about issues of losing control. All of a sudden, I started to see how the three strands were indeed wanting to converse. The loss of control, perhaps physically and/or emotionally, we experience as we grow older. The loss of control over a child’s life as that child grows older. The loss of control of health in the aftermath of a diagnosis. I asked the writer if she had talked to her friend about parenting before the friend was diagnosed. The writer said she had. So that was in part the person she was with this friend. She was a mother who could talk to this friend about how she felt about “losing” her little boy, about having him grow toward manhood where he would make choices on his own, etc.  How, then, did the friend’s diagnosis affect the person the writer was with her? Did that diagnosis change her from mother to something else? I realized that what was keeping this strand from conversing with the other two was the fact that in the sections about the friend’s illness, the focus was always on the friend and what it was like for her to get that diagnosis. Ah, but what was it like for the writer? That seemed to be the key to better fitting this strand into the others.

It seems to me that with something like a braided essay, it’s helpful at some point  to write a single word in the center of a piece of paper, the word that your instincts tell you is at the heart of the essay. Free-associating with that idea is a good way to discover the other strands of the essay and to start exploring that question of why these strands belong in the same piece. How do they connect to that single word that you’ve written down? This can be a helpful process when you’re first drafting the essay as well as when you’re re-envisioning it.

Our other essay was in the form of an interrogation. The writer created two personae. One was the part of her who had always told a family story a certain way. The other persona was the part of her who insisted on knowing why she chose to tell the story that way when she knew it wasn’t completely true. The essay was in the form of a back and forth dialogue between these two parts. We talked about how the personal essay takes this very approach even in a more traditional form. We’re always watching the writer’s mind at work as the various parts of the self engage in conversation. Why, then, did this particular essay have to be shaped into this form? As I recall (and my students may need to help me out here), we decided that the form of the interrogation made it impossible for the writer to get off the hook. The form pinned her down so she had to answer. Perhaps the questions from the interrogator provided a means of forcing herself to take a harder look at the material and the self than she would have done in a more traditional form.

When we began this workshop in March, I said that our focus would be on characterization and form. I closed yesterday with some thoughts about how the writer’s job, no matter the genre, was to deepen characters and situation. Of course, in creative nonfiction this deepening often involves writing from those contradictions that we all have within us. I made reference to Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners and what she says about the writer needing to be able to see different layers of reality in a single image, character, situation. To my way of thinking, this is as true for the nonfiction writer as it is for the fiction writer, and that’s why I encourage us all to practice thinking in terms of opposites. Love can co-exist with hatred. Courage can co-exist with cowardice. Moral judgment can co-exist with decency. You can keep forming binaries for a long, long time. Human nature and the world around us is that complicated. Paying attention to characterization and finding the proper form in which to contain the appropriate opposites will create memorable essays.

So I wish you all a happy summer! I’m not sure what I’ll do blog-wise this summer, but you can bet it’ll be something. Until next time, whenever that time may be, I pass along this advice from Isak Dinesen who said she wrote a little each day, without too much hope, without too much despair. Stay in love with the journey, my friends, and trust that it’ll take you where you’re meant to be.

 

 

From the Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Week 9

This week, using Suzanne Farrell Smith’s article, “The Inner Identity of Immersion Memoir,” from the December 2011 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, we spent some time talking about this form of the genre. Perhaps the most well-known recent example is Robin Hemley’s memoir, Do-Over, in which he returns to relive his high school prom, a class play, and other childhood experiences in order to re-do them in hopes of creating more successful outcomes. Here’s how Robin explains the immersion memoir:  “To me, in ‘Immersion Memoir,’ a writer creates a kind of framework to actively iengage in experience and memory.” Key to this immersion, is the author as quest hero, that figure leaving the safety of the known world and traveling into the unknown in order to see what might be obtained or learned. In immersion memoir, the writer leaves the comfort of his or her contemporary space in order to return to past experience. R0bin, for example, returns to the summer camp of his youth . The immersion memoirist, Smith points out in her article, looks at the past through the lens of immersion. The present-day quest forms a story line and a method for the retrieval of memory and the creation of new memories. The immersion offers a necessary means of looking at the past and how it intersects with the present and future.

The question arose in our conversation yesterday about whether the immersion memoirist must always be recreating experience by trying to relive it. Does that memoirist, ala Robin Hemley, have to be attending a prom, performing in a school play, attending summer camp? The question is one that insists on a strict classification, and, as I pointed out, this is an interesting pursuit on an intellectual level, this attempt to say what something is and what something isn’t, but when it comes to our practice, it seems to me that the useful question is how immersion can benefit any type of memoir.

When I was writing my book, Turning Bones, which I describe as a book of fiction and nonfiction–part memoir, part family history, part invention–I traveled to Nicholas County, Kentucky, the place where my great-great-grandparents, John A. and Elizabeth Gaunce Martin married and began my family line. I was on a quest to resurrect my ancestors, and I hoped in Nicholas County to find relatives, unknown to me,  who could tell me things about the family that I didn’t know. The story of my quest provided a lens through which I not only became more intimate with my ancestors, it also, much to my surprise, allowed me to discover myself.

Which was the case, one day in a smoke-filled cafe in Carlisle, Kentucky, when I went to talk to an elderly man, Boswell Keller, who had descended from the Gaunces. I hoped he could tell me who John A. Martin’s father was. I hoped Boswell Keller could take me back another generation. When I asked him for that information, having tolerated the offensive air of the cafe, having shouted at the top of my lungs to compensate for the fact that he was hard of hearing, he raised his hand and pointed a finger at me, and I thought the moment was finally there when I’d learn the name of my great-great-great grandfather. But all Boswell Keller could tell me was that “there was a world of Martins back then.” He told me he just couldn’t get it all studied out:

I heard the regret in his voice, and I knew that he had turned this over in his mind again and again. We were fellow travelers, obsessed with the past, but Boswell Keller was more desperate because he knew that his time was running out.

I reached across the table and shook his hand. “I guess we’re some kind of cousins,” I said.

“Yes, sir.” He smiled and squeezed my hand. “I reckon we are.”

That moment made it all worthwhile–the smoky air, the shouting I had done. I was glad that I had found Boswell Keller, thankful that I had made my journey to Kentucky, if for no other reason than to look into the face of this man and to see in his eyes how thankful he was that I had come.

So I experienced a surprising moment of familial connection, all because I made the journey, asked the questions, immersed myself in a quest.

The writing activity for this week? Simple. Leave your writing room. Go someplace that matters to your past. Visit the home where you grew up, perhaps. Knock on the door. Tell the people who live there now that you spent your childhood in that house. See if they’ll invite you in. Take note of what happens inside you as you revisit that place. Even if you don’t get inside, you’ll have this story to tell of the attempt and of what it made you feel to be on the steps, looking through the doorway. There are countless other trips that you could make. Find a friend from the past. Make plans to meet at a place the two of you once frequented. Did you used to play whiffle ball on a schoolyard? Shoot baskets at a playground hoop? Get busy. Do it again.  Or visit your elementary school, your high school. See if you can actually sit in a class, become a “student” again.  A bar or coffee shop from  your college days in which significant and perhaps unresolved parts of your life took place? See if that place is still in business. Go there. If it’s not in business, go there anyway. See what’s on that site. A favorite route you drove when you were a teenager? The two lane blacktop out to the state park, perhaps, and the road that wound around the lake and the hidden coves and points where you parked with your date? Drive that route again. Still in love with that date? Take her or him there. When you write of your experience with whatever means of immersion that you choose, let us know why it was so necessary for you. Let us know what was at stake for you on your quest. Let the story of that quest, sweep you back into the past, back across your present, and forward into your future.

 

 

From the Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Week 10

This week, using Suzanne Farrell Smith’s article, “The Inner Identity of Immersion Memoir,” from the December 2011 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, we spent some time talking about this form of the genre. Perhaps the most well-known recent example is Robin Hemley’s memoir, Do-Over, in which he returns to relive his high school prom, a class play, and other childhood experiences in order to re-do them in hopes of creating more successful outcomes. Here’s how Robin explains the immersion memoir:  “To me, in ‘Immersion Memoir,’ a writer creates a kind of framework to actively iengage in experience and memory.” Key to this immersion, is the author as quest hero, that figure leaving the safety of the known world and traveling into the unknown in order to see what might be obtained or learned. In immersion memoir, the writer leaves the comfort of his or her contemporary space in order to return to past experience. R0bin, for example, returns to the summer camp of his youth . The immersion memoirist, Smith points out in her article, looks at the past through the lens of immersion. The present-day quest forms a story line and a method for the retrieval of memory and the creation of new memories. The immersion offers a necessary means of looking at the past and how it intersects with the present and future.

The question arose in our conversation yesterday about whether the immersion memoirist must always be recreating experience by trying to relive it. Does that memoirist, ala Robin Hemley, have to be attending a prom, performing in a school play, attending summer camp? The question is one that insists on a strict classification, and, as I pointed out, this is an interesting pursuit on an intellectual level, this attempt to say what something is and what something isn’t, but when it comes to our practice, it seems to me that the useful question is how immersion can benefit any type of memoir.

When I was writing my book, Turning Bones, which I describe as a book of fiction and nonfiction–part memoir, part family history, part invention–I traveled to Nicholas County, Kentucky, the place where my great-great-grandparents, John A. and Elizabeth Gaunce Martin married and began my family line. I was on a quest to resurrect my ancestors, and I hoped in Nicholas County to find relatives, unknown to me,  who could tell me things about the family that I didn’t know. The story of my quest provided a lens through which I not only became more intimate with my ancestors, it also, much to my surprise, allowed me to discover myself.

Which was the case, one day in a smoke-filled cafe in Carlisle, Kentucky, when I went to talk to an elderly man, Boswell Keller, who had descended from the Gaunces. I hoped he could tell me who John A. Martin’s father was. I hoped Boswell Keller could take me back another generation. When I asked him for that information, having tolerated the offensive air of the cafe, having shouted at the top of my lungs to compensate for the fact that he was hard of hearing, he raised his hand and pointed a finger at me, and I thought the moment was finally there when I’d learn the name of my great-great-great grandfather. But all Boswell Keller could tell me was that “there was a world of Martins back then.” He told me he just couldn’t get it all studied out:

I heard the regret in his voice, and I knew that he had turned this over in his mind again and again. We were fellow travelers, obsessed with the past, but Boswell Keller was more desperate because he knew that his time was running out.

I reached across the table and shook his hand. “I guess we’re some kind of cousins,” I said.

“Yes, sir.” He smiled and squeezed my hand. “I reckon we are.”

That moment made it all worthwhile–the smoky air, the shouting I had done. I was glad that I had found Boswell Keller, thankful that I had made my journey to Kentucky, if for no other reason than to look into the face of this man and to see in his eyes how thankful he was that I had come.

So I experienced a surprising moment of familial connection, all because I made the journey, asked the questions, immersed myself in a quest.

The writing activity for this week? Simple. Leave your writing room. Go someplace that matters to your past. Visit the home where you grew up, perhaps. Knock on the door. Tell the people who live there now that you spent your childhood in that house. See if they’ll invite you in. Take note of what happens inside you as you revisit that place. Even if you don’t get inside, you’ll have this story to tell of the attempt and of what it made you feel to be on the steps, looking through the doorway. There are countless other trips that you could make. Find a friend from the past. Make plans to meet at a place the two of you once frequented. Did you used to play whiffle ball on a schoolyard? Shoot baskets at a playground hoop? Get busy. Do it again.  Or visit your elementary school, your high school. See if you can actually sit in a class, become a “student” again.  A bar or coffee shop from  your college days in which significant and perhaps unresolved parts of your life took place? See if that place is still in business. Go there. If it’s not in business, go there anyway. See what’s on that site. A favorite route you drove when you were a teenager? The two lane blacktop out to the state park, perhaps, and the road that wound around the lake and the hidden coves and points where you parked with your date? Drive that route again. Still in love with that date? Take her or him there. When you write of your experience with whatever means of immersion that you choose, let us know why it was so necessary for you. Let us know what was at stake for you on your quest. Let the story of that quest, sweep you back into the past, back across your present, and forward into your future.

 

 

From the Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Week 8

Much of our conversation yesterday sprang from a brief article by Sue William Silverman in which she discusses the importance of voice in creative nonfiction. Borrowing from William Blake, she defines the two major voices that writers use in memoirs and personal essays as The Song (or Voice) of Innocence, and The Song (or Voice) of Experience. The first, as Sue says, “relates the facts of the experience, the surface subject.” This is the voice of narration, telling us what happened in what order. This voice, in its purest form, can know only what the innocent “you” knew at the time of the events. The Voice of Experience, on the other hand, knows much, much more from its wiser position of distance from the events. This voice is the more reflective voice, the voice that interprets the subject matter and guides the reader through the experience that’s being dramatized.

Sue uses an example from her second memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction, to illustrate how the two voices can intertwine. In this section of her memoir, she’s recalling her experience as a college freshman with an older, married lover, via a scarf that he gave her: “I press the scarf against my nose and mouth. I take a deep breath. The scent is of him–leaves smoldering in autumn dusk–and I believe it is a scent I have always craved, one I will always want. I don’t understand why the scent of the scarf. . .seems more knowable, more tangible than the rest of him.”

Sue’s passage, as she points out in the article, begins with the Voice of Experience romanticizing the man and the scarf before “moving into a more sober persona, the Voice of Experience, which reveals that the scarf is a metaphor for alienation, loneliness, loss. This sober, experienced voice, in other words, guides the reader through the quagmire of the addiction.” Sue goes on to point out that the texture of the Voice of Innocence blending with the Voice of Experience allows the writer to deepen his or her own character. She advocates using these voices to form a cohesive chord. “For without these varied voices,” she argues, “what you have, basically, is a one-note voice telling a one-note story.”

With the objective of forming that cohesive chord, Sue comes up with five “notes” that can move the “you” as character from Innocence to Experience.

Which leads me to this week’s writing exercise. I asked the MFA students yesterday to come up with prompts for an exercise that would allow people to put Sue’s five notes into practice. So, with apologies to Sue for blending our voices with  hers, here’s what we came up with. I’ll first quote the notes as Sue has described them, and then I’ll insert the writing prompt that my students devised. You’ll also notice that I decided that the blog could benefit from some actions shots from the workshop.

Before getting to Sue’s “notes,” I’d ask everyone to think of an object that they associate with a guilty feeling from childhood. Perhaps it’s the candy bar you stole, or the toy that you whined and whined for and then promptly lost or broke. Anything concrete that gives you a guilty feeling now when you think of it.

Marty Ross-Dolen and Dominic Russ have a friendly discussion about objects and guilt.

Sue’s Note 1: “An impersonal, factual persona is an element of the Song of Innocence and provides straightforward exposition to let the reader know where you are in time and place.”

Writing Prompt: Writing in the present tense, begin with a line something like, “I am (fill in the blank)-years-old, and I’m (fill in the blank by considering place, time, the object, other characters). Your objective is to set the scene by utilizing only the Voice of Innocence.

Sue’s Note 2: “An observant but still slightly distant persona that introduces a more writerly style, yet is still part of the Song of Innocence. Here, you provide the reader with an idea of how you observe your world of the senses.”

Writing Prompt: Begin a sentence with, “I see (or smell, taste, hear, feel), and then fill in the blank with a combination of sensory details. If you can use more than one sense, all the better. Concentrate on the object in the way that Sue focused on the scarf in her example.

Nicole Butler contemplates a writing prompt.

Sue’s Note 3: “A more evolved persona, one with feelings,  hovering between the Song of Innocence and the Song of Experience. You’re writing closer to the heart, with a sense of urgency and raw emotion. . . .here you will explore how you felt when the events originally occurred. In other words, you’re feeling the facts of the story.”

Writing Prompt: Begin a sentence with, “It [the object] makes me think of (fill in the blank), and I believe (fill in the blank). Here we’re trying to articulate something you felt or believed at the time of the event, a feeling or thought that’s probably evolved over time.

Sue’s Note 4: By introducing a metaphoric persona, you bring the reader into the Song of Experience. This metaphoric voice beings to offer insight into the facts and feelings.

Writing Prompt: Use your object to construct a metaphor. “The [object] is (fill in the blank. Construct more than one metaphor if you wish. Let the metaphors contain your emotional response to the event and the object and the feeling of guilt that you still carry with you.

Sue’s Note 5: This fully developed, reflective character (Song of Experience) culminates with all the notes. Metaphor is deepened in order to connect each element and event in the work into a cohesive whole. You reflect and ruminate upon the past, consider others in your life. What do you hope, wish, dream, fear? What are the lessons you’ve learned?

Writing Prompt: Write a sentence of action involving you and the object. The complete this sentence: “I didn’t know that. . . .” And this one, “When I think of the boy/girl I was then, I. . . .”

Tory Adkisson and Kristen Grayewski congratulate each other on the successful completion of the writing exercise.

From the Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Week 7

We had the pleasure yesterday of a visit from Stewart O’Nan, best known for novels such as Emily, Alone, Wish You Were Here, Speed Queen, Songs for the Missing, and the recently released, The Odds, but also the author of an interesting book of nonfiction, The Circus Fire, about the horrible blaze on July 5, 1944, in Hartford, Connecticut. We’d read an excerpt from the book as well as last week’s articles from Gerard and Schwartz, so we were prepared with questions for Stewart about the research and writing of his book.

Here are some interesting thoughts that came from Stewart’s thoughtful responses to our questions:

1.     In response to a question about whether the way he approaches writing fiction differs from his approach to writing nonfiction, he talked about his obligation. In fiction,  he said, his obligation was to his characters and the accuracy of their actions and responses within a specific world. Such hold true for his approach to nonfiction as well, but in that genre his obligation expands to take on the expectations of his readers, who come to hear a true story, and to the material itself as he does his best to pin down the facts.

2.     Considering the level of detail in The Circus Fire, which I would describe as lush and authoritative, Stewart talked about how he wanted “coverage” in the book. In other words, he wanted to include as many particulars as he could, not only the facts of the fire, but also the particulars of the circus world and the world of North Hartford in 1944. Stewart expressed a mild complaint about his approach, claiming that he sometimes included details that the reader didn’t need and that the story could have moved along more quickly had he pared things down. It was refreshing to hear such an accomplished writer speak critically of his own work, proving what we all know: It’s so hard to get everything right.

3.     Stewart also talked about how he broke the first rule of journalism, which is, the more sources you have, the more confusing the story gets. In this complicated story of a fire, the source of which has never been nailed down, many inadequacies and rumors have spread. In the interviews that Stewart did, he found many conflicting stories. Thus, his job was to corroborate as many of the facts as he could. If he was unable to nail down a fact, he quoted the person claiming that fact to make clear that this was this one particular person’s version of the truth.I can understand, then, the attempt to gather more sources in an attempt to verify more facts. Still, Stewart feels he could have simplified things for the readers.

4.     Stewart also talked about conducting interviews with people who had either gone to the circus that fateful day or perhaps meant to go but for one reason or the other stayed home. I’ve long believed that conducting interviews is very much a matter of carrying on a good conversation that begins with the interviewer’s curiosity. Stewart said he usually began his interview with the question, “Tell me about that day.” I like this open-ended approach, this invitation to narrate. It focuses the interview subject on the facts while also leaving room for stories and details that might not come out if the interviewer has too strict of an agenda. The interviewer, as Stewart did, can then direct the conversation with appropriate prompts: “Did you go to the circus that day?” “Where did you sit?’ “What did you do when you realized the tent was on fire?” Etc.

Stewart spent a glorious hour with us during which he was generous and forthcoming and extremely personable. It was easy to see that interview subjects would feel very comfortable telling their stories to him. Again, I stress the importance of being curious. It’s in people’s nature to tell us what they know. . .if we’ll only ask them.

The rest of our workshop featured the discussion of two essays from our members. Both essays, interestingly enough, experimented with form. One of them was a photo essay, the photographs providing invitations and illustrations of the text. The other essay was what Brenda Miller would call a hermit crab essay, taking on, in this case, the form of a class syllabus as a way of investigating extremely complicated and personal material about gender identification. Both writers were doing interesting things with the juxtaposition of form and content, and it reminded me of  an earlier conversation this quarter that came from the Brenda Miller article that described the efficacy of these non-traditional forms in terms of them providing the safety from which to express difficult material.

The images of the photo essay were not only representational of the objects photographed but also contained the emotional complexity of the writer’s feelings about those objects. The imperative language of the syllabus stood in stark contrast to the moments of vulnerability and uncertainty that arose in the text itself. This contrast between certainty/comfort and uncertainty/discomfort led me to improvisie a writing activity on the spot. I’ll try to reconstruct, expand, and refine it now:

1.     Think of one thing about yourself that you’d like to change. Maybe it’s a physical feature, or maybe it’s a personality trait. Anything that you wish you could change and that is within your power to change.

2.     Imagine that you’ve achieved that change. Writing in the second person, Imagine a perfect moment in which you’re free from the flaw that’s burdened you. Be specific. Maybe it’s a glorious spring day, and you’re walking through a park. Maybe you’re challenged by another person or an occurrence, but you don’t react the way you would have in your prior life. You’re someone different now. You’re better, more ideal. Describe the landscape around you with that fact in mind. Maybe you begin, “One day, you’re the person you always wished you could be. You’re walking down the street and. . . .” Evoke a feeling of confidence and security. Your past life is gone. You have faith in the future.

3.    Shift to what you can’t know within that cocoon of comfort. Allow a glimmer of your past life to emerge. “You can’t know that somewhere in the future you’ll see/hear/meet/etc. (fill in the blank with a particular; maybe you’ll meet a person who reminds you of who you used to be; maybe you’ll catch yourself about to say or do something that you would have said or done in your previous life), and when you do, you’ll (fill in the blank with your emotional and/or intellectual response, looking for the contradictory layers within that response).”

I’d love to hear how this activity works for you. I’d even be glad to see some samples posted to this site.  Feel free to modify the prompts anyway you’d like. The objective is to end on a resonate chord made up of at least two different notes, one of comfort and one of dread; one of certainty and one of uncertainty; one of this old life still visible beneath the veneer of the new life.

 

 

From the Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Week 6

I’m pleased to have my student, Marty Ross-Dolen, as a guest blogger this week. After Marty’s entry concerning research in creative nonfiction, I’ll add a writing exercise, but now, here’s Marty:

 

I would like to thank Lee for this opportunity to act as a guest contributor to his blog.  I offered to write this week because I am both fascinated by this topic of research as it applies to the genre of creative nonfiction and because I love taking part in Lee’s class in the real world so much that I figured the virtual classroom would extend the discussion longer, which I easily welcome.

Philip Gerard, in his article entitled “The Art of Creative Research” published in the October/November 2006 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, defines research as “a habit, an attitude of open-minded alertness, a way of being in the world, or being alert for knowledge in any form – knowledge defined as some clue I didn’t have before about how the world works.”  He continues, “Research takes you the writer out of yourself, frees you for a time from paralyzing self-absorption, while offering endless fascinating subjects,” and highlights the “stories [that are] buried under our feet, painted over on the facades of our cities and towns, silenced under the barrage of everyday noise, forgotten or lost by death, erased from the public memory, but the writer can find them.”

As a curious person by nature, I must admit that the idea of research both excites and overwhelms me.  What I know of the world of academic research from my days in high school, college, and medical school is that information is vast, endless, and not always easy to access, and we as writers are responsible to it – we need to be thorough, follow leads, exhaust options, defer to it, and refer to it, always, with the proper references and quotes.  I never found much joy in writing the technical, familiar “research paper,” so the end point of all the tedious work didn’t bring me a lot of personal satisfaction, only the notion that I had collected information and regurgitated it back onto the page for someone to read and, worse, grade.

Yet I find the activity of research for the purpose of gaining Gerard’s definition of knowledge to be addictive.  In fact, a few weeks ago I was writing an essay for Lee’s workshop about my late grandparents and the changes that occurred in their marriage over the sixty years of their being together.  I knew, because they told me, that they were both raised in Jewish families, had both grown up in the boroughs of New York City, met at a summer camp outside the city that was owned by my grandmother’s family, and had secretly eloped.  But I didn’t know where in New York they had each lived (Had they grown up close to each other?), where the camp was located exactly, and what their roles were at the camp (Wasn’t my grandfather at dental school in Philadelphia at the time?  Why was he at the camp?).

So, as Gerard suggests, I interviewed my father via email, quickly and while at the keyboard penning the essay, to see what he knew.  He responded with confirmation that my grandfather was a counselor during the summer that he met my grandmother.  He also sent a Wikipedia link to an article about a certain Camp Windsor, a 365-acre campground with a 13-acre lake, located in Starlight, PA, on the edge of the Poconos.  The camp was a privately owned (by my great-grandparents) summer camp for Jewish kids which eventually became rundown and unused when it was bought by the B’nai B’rith organization in January, 1954.  It has since enjoyed a rich history as an active meeting sight for youth leadership training as well as a summer camp for the B’nai B’rith organization.

With the name Camp Windsor and an address, I was able to explore Google to follow its distance from New York, pull up old postcards that showed photographs of the beautiful campsite, and even read oral histories of elderly people who went there as campers and held fond childhood memories of this magical place.  I followed this search with some more time spent at one of my favorite websites, www.ancestry.com, and studied the 1910, 1920, and 1930 censuses, finding the addresses of my grandparents’ family homes, reading their neighbors’ names, and imagining these immigrant families speaking in their native tongues huddled together in apartment buildings raising their children in this new world.  My grandparents moved around a lot, but they never lived in the same spot at the same time.  And, given the dates, my grandfather took a summer off of dental school to work at Camp Windsor, met my grandmother, and, as they say, the rest is history.

Mimi Schwartz, in her article “Research and Creative Nonfiction: Writing So the Seams Don’t Show” featured in the December, 2004 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, speaks about the difference between using research to write the creative nonfiction piece as opposed to the academic, journalistic piece.  “Whereas utilitarian nonfiction tells us what we should know, creative nonfiction also lets us feel the knowing – not just intellectually, but in the gut.”  She continues, “At its best, research enriches the text, making people, events, and their historic and cultural contexts come alive more fully, [and] at its worst, research interrupts the narrative flow and breaks down the voice, so that the writing sounds more like a textbook or news report than like creative nonfiction.”  She goes on to speak about the importance of writing so “the seams of research don’t show,” allowing the reader to absorb a story enhanced by factual information, rather than have that same information forced into the reader’s bank of knowledge without a surrounding context that gives the material greater meaning.

In thinking about Schwartz’s message, it turns out that I didn’t offer too many details about my grandparents’ early years in my essay and only gave a short description of it, although I was able to give it a name and a location when I made reference to Camp Windsor in the piece.  But my new knowledge informed me as a writer, and I felt like a different person as I wrote the essay – a more connected granddaughter with greater confidence in who my grandparents were as young people at a time when I didn’t even exist.  Without the research, the piece would have felt more superficial to me, absent of depth from my new knowledge.

Finally, I would strongly recommend Gerard’s article to any writer who is daunted by the task of undertaking a large research project.  He does a wonderful job of explaining the process, describes its “messy and surprising” nature, and suggests techniques, such as establishing a timeline, that can only help to compartmentalize what, in my case, is boxes and boxes of letters written by my (other) grandmother that sit in the corner of my office waiting for me to uncover and discover.  Not all tedious and time-consuming activities reap as great a reward as that of researching a topic for the purpose of creating a better piece of writing, one that enriches the minds of both the writer and the reader alike.

 

Writing Activity:

The objective of this activity is to use research as a means of discovery, whether you’re writing about your own life, another person, a place, or an event.

(1)   Write down everything you think you know about a person, a place, or an event. “This is the sort of person who would. . . . .” “This is a place where. . . .” This event occurred because. . . .” Act as if you know everything there is to know.

(2)   Then do some research with the challenge of finding out something you didn’t know. Read newspaper reports, conduct interviews, look at photographs, poke around in the county courthouse records, visit a local or state historical society. Find something that makes you look at the person, place, or event from a different angle. Find something that opens the material up in a way you couldn’t have predicted.

(3)   Create a passage that contains a moment of surprise, a moment where for the first time you knew something in a way you never knew it previously. If writing about a person, you might begin with the prompt, “Usually my father (or whomever you’re exploring). . . .”  The idea here is to establish a baseline for the person by offering up what may be the prevalent aspect of his or her character as you recall it. You’re looking for habitual action. “Usually, my father checked the locks each night at bedtime and then tromped up the stairs, pausing at the top to tell my brother and me to pipe down and go to sleep.” Then continue by veering off from that baseline with the prompt, “Then one night (or day). . . .”  You might say, for example, “Then one night, we didn’t hear him coming up the stairs. We waited and waited, but all we heard was the ticking of the grandfather clock on the landing. Finally, we crept out of our bedroom, looked through the stairway railing and saw our father kneeling on the floor below us, his hands clasped together in prayer.” You can do the same, of course, by using not memory but something discovered in research as I did with the Farm Bureau pamphlet and the photograph. You can also do the same for a place or an event. All you have to do is write about what you knew and then show us the information or artifact that turned your certainty on its ear.

Issues for Further Consideration:

It’s important that nonfiction writers know enough to get a piece of writing underway. They know what it was like to be a part of their family, for instance, or they know what it’s like to live in a particular town, or they know the facts of a specific event.  It’s equally important for these writers to admit to themselves and to us that they don’t know everything, that there’s still much to be learned. Their research, then, as long as they’re open to such learning, can take them to interesting places that will complicate what they think and feel.  If indeed the essay is a conversation between the various parts of the writer’s self as he or she attempts to come to some sort of meaning, then it’s absolutely crucial that the writer open him or herself to the various contradictions within that self as well as within others, and the places that they occupy. Research isn’t just fact gathering; it’s also a chance to discover something new and unanticipated in our responses to the world at large.